Brands can spam you through Facebook Messenger – Here’s how to stop them

Do you follow any of your favorite brands’ Facebook pages? If you follow a brand that you love, then you probably enjoy seeing news feed posts about their products and sales. If you’re not of fan of these ads, then you have options for cleaning up your news feed.

These pages can also make communicating with retailers a lot easier. You can use Facebook Messenger to contact representatives to voice complaints or ask questions. Unfortunately, reaching out to a company this way may get you more than you bargained for.

You might start to notice retailers striking up conversations with you. A new Facebook feature will make it so that retailers can send you unsolicited ads through the Messenger app. Most likely it will be chat bots reminding you of promotional offers or announcing new products.

Understandably, not everyone wants to be contacted this way. The upside is the retailers can only message you if you’ve started a conversation with them in the past. So if want to reach out to a company to voice concerns without getting spammed, try calling them instead.

If you’ve already reached out to a retailer via Facebook Messenger, try this! Here are some instructions for blocking messages from certain pages.

On a phone or tablet:

Go to that retailer’s page and select “Message.”

Then select “Manage” in the top right-hand corner and then “Manage Messages.”

Select “Block All Messages” and that retailer won’t be able to contact you.

On a laptop or desktop:

Go to that retailer’s page and select “Message.”

A chat window will pop up, select the options icon in the top right-hand corner of the window.

Select “Block Messages” from the drop down menu and then again in the confirmation message.

Hopefully, Facebook will create an opt-out method because unwanted ads are really annoying. To get rid of some of the ads in your news feed, try changing your ad preferences.